My dissertation views Lebanon as an important setting for competing networks of revolution, counterrevolution, and empire on local, regional, and global scales in the second half of the 20th century. While treated as an internal conflict in the existing literature, the growth, transnational circulation, and demise of the war’s opposing political camps involved far more than Lebanese politics. The encounter between these rival networks erupted into civil and international war in 1975 and endured until the end of the Cold War. Drawing on Lebanese, Palestinian, American, and British archives, unpublished papers, pamphlets, and media reports in Arabic, English, and French, I explore how Middle Eastern actors employed and transformed transnational networks and ideologies of conflict, while arguing the war was a crucial setting for the US and its allies after Vietnam. Using what I call the “Third World War” as a conceptual framework, I track the linkages between people, materiel, and ideas across sites of conflict, enabling a rethinking of the Cold War as an international civil war connecting actors in numerous states, and often driven by events in the “periphery.” My dissertation thus meshes the history and historiography of Lebanon with that of the greater Middle East, decolonization, and the global Cold War.

Selected Grants and Awards

International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Social Science Research Council, 2016